The ability to accept PayPal is a frequently requested feature of the Cart Plugin for the Koken Photography CMS. We're pleased to announce that update v1.1.0 adds Braintree Payments, a PayPal Company, as an alternative to Stripe. Braintree is available in more than 40 countries and allows Koken users to accept payments in over 130 currencies. Learn more at Braintree and the Koken Store.
Already have the Cart plugin? Update now for free.

The ability to sell and ship prints, posters, framed art, or any other medium that suits your photos, has been the most requested enhancement to the Cart plugin. After launching the Cart plugin with support for digital downloads, adding support for physical items was our first priority. Today the Cart plugin has support for custom options and in this post we'll look at using this feature to enable selling of physical goods.

From the Cart plugin settings screen, enabling custom order options allows you to create your own checkout options and pricing. These options can be used for common print sizes, larger posters, framed works, or any other medium you choose to offer.

Portfolio visitors will see a selection of options at the pricing set earlier. Stripe's streamlined checkout is a convenient and safe way to accept customer payments.

After a purchase Stripe will notify you that a payment has been accepted and you may now fulfill the order. All important order information, such as shipping address, photo filename and the print size is available in Stripe's payment dashboard.

Koken can now populate its image cache ahead of time, resulting in dramatically increased initial page load speeds. Visitors will no longer need to wait for responsive images to be generated on demand.

How it works

From the Settings > Image publishing panel click the “Build image cache” button. Koken will then generate the most common image sizes & ratios and add them to the cache. Depending on the number of images in your Library this process might take a while.

Here's some background so you understand why what we're announcing today is so significant. Koken creates images by using the image processing software on your web server. This process generates up to 28 different versions of your images for optimum resolution and load times across all devices (phones, tablets, desktops, etc). Because of resource limitations inherent in a shared hosting environment, Koken generated each image on demand. This often led to slow page load times until the server generated and cached each image.

We've been busy with important fixes since our last blog post. See a full list of the updates at the release notes page. Today we released Koken 0.22.0 featuring Album downloads for our Elementary, Madison 2 and Axis 2 themes. Many Koken users requested the ability to allow site visitors to download entire albums at once. Now you can!

Is there anything you wish Koken could do? Post it to our feedback site as a feature request and help us prioritize our development efforts by ranking requests based on popularity.

How it works

The screenshot below shows an album page in Site using our Axis 2 theme. When Show download link is selected in the Album's Template Settings a download icon appears next to the album name. This adds a link for site visitors to download any already downloadable images in the album as a single zip file.

Album downloads in Koken

Only images with downloading enabled will be included in the album download. For a refresher on image downloading, view the Publish image download links documentation.

Several new updates are available today for Koken users. We've released Koken 0.21.9 with a few important fixes. See a full list of the updates at the release notes page. At the request of many Koken users, we added many new language packs to our Premium Themes. Our Premium Themes now produce websites in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch and Danish. Many thanks to Bjarne Varöystrand of the Koken Community Support forum for contributing the Scandinavian language translations.

There's a new update for our recently released Cart plugin. We've improved the ability to select images available for sale, added the ability to run Stripe in test mode and enabled persistent download links for previously purchased images. Keep the feature requests coming as we continue to develop this exciting enhancement.

We also updated the Image Protector plugin to fix a display issue when used with custom padding and restored its functionality when used with the Cart plugin. Finally, an Email Endpoints plugin update now adds the verified sender address setting required by Mandril.

The NetObjects Family wishes you peace, prosperity and happiness this holiday season and throughout the new year.

We're happy to announce the release of Cart, a new premium plugin now available in the Koken Store. Cart allows you to sell and distribute digital downloads of your images & videos using Stripe. Stripe is a payments processor that makes it easy accept payments online. `

Like all of our themes and plugins, Cart can be installed without ever leaving your browser, meaning you can purchase the plugin and start selling from your Koken site in a matter of minutes. Sound good? Then head over to the Koken Store product page for the Cart plugin to learn more then purchase and install.

Since the acquisition the NetObjects team has been hard at work learning Koken and diving into customer support. Today we released Koken 0.21.3. This minor release squashes a few bugs, makes the site settings property panel dock-able and adds enhancements to several themes. For more information review the release notes. For newer users who are updating for the first time, here's how.

NetObjects is excited to announce the acquisition of Koken has closed and are thrilled to add Koken to our portfolio of website design products. We’ve put together an experienced team committed to the continued success of Koken.

Work is well underway to address areas that need improvement and to continue to enhance Koken. We understand that without you, Koken cannot exist. I'd appreciate you answering a few questions to help ensure our development plans are aligned with your goals and desires.

We are thrilled to announce that Koken has agreed to be acquired by NetObjects. The acquisition, subject to customary closing conditions, has been approved by the Board of Directors of both companies, and is expected to close by September 30, 2015.

About NetObjects

NetObjects has been developing, marketing and distributing web design software since 1995. They are a mature, established company with extensive experience and knowledge in the self-hosted software space. Their website design software, NetObjects Fusion, has garnered hundreds of awards and eleven patents, has licensed 15 million copies, and has facilitated the creation of millions of websites.

Here's what they have to say:

"We are proud to add this exceptional product to our award-winning portfolio of web design products. The Koken CMS meets every need for managing and sharing our ever growing libraries of digital images -- whether run from a home based server or a shared hosting account -- the user is in complete control of their images. For the past few years I've used Koken to manage my own personal photography website. We at NetObjects are excited to continue development of this special application and introduce it to an even larger global audience." -- Steve Raubenstine, President and CEO of NetObjects

What this means for current users

This acquisition is great news for our community, for you may continue to use Koken to publish your web site and upload photography. NetObjects shares our vision for providing quality software that may be independently installed and operated through your own web hosting provider. Independence, ownership and control of your content is a vision we both share and respect.

What this means for new users

New installations of Koken may continue to be set up, for free, same as ever. NetObjects shares our enthusiasm for the freemium business model and will continue to offer free installations of the core system in addition to expanding the Koken Store with a mix of free and premium themes and plugins.

Last words

We believe this acquisition is the best possible outcome for everyone, including our community. We love Koken as much as our most ardent supporters and worked incredibly hard to find a company with the requisite resources, leadership, and vision to continue developing, supporting and expanding the Koken platform. NetObjects checked every box on our list, and we're super excited to see where Koken goes from here.

We’ve had numerous, extended conversations with third parties of all shapes and sizes, including sole proprietors, small design studios, venture capitalists, as well as established software companies. A few are people we reached-out to directly prior to the announcement, others are people that came across the news and contacted us shortly thereafter.

If there’s one thing we’ve come to appreciate during this time, this is a slow, methodical process that not only involves two parties discussing finances, terms and details, but also getting to know each other. Everyone has different ideas, plans and projections for how Koken would fit with their existing business, and part of our job is sorting through which opportunities make the most sense in the long term for ourselves, our community and the product itself. It's hard to hit all three targets, but we're trying our best.

In general we're very positive and optimistic that Koken will indeed find a new home. We're trying to move quickly, while at the same time allowing enough time for the process to play itself out. People continue to come out of the woodwork expressing interest, and we're giving each and every opportunity the attention it deserves. As soon as we have more information to share, we will.

After considerable reflection and discussion, we've decided the time has come for us to step aside and seek new owners for Koken. As much as we'd like to stay, all of us have decided to pursue new professional opportunities that will prevent us from being able to support and develop the platform going forward. This was a painful, difficult decision, but we feel it's ultimately the best for Koken and our community. Koken deserves new leadership and a new home.

To reach audiences outside of the Koken community we've published a lengthy Medium post explaining the decision in detail, along with a number of interesting statistics and financial details.

To everyone who installed, used, and spread the word about Koken these past few years, we thank you. Rest assured this announcement will not affect your Koken installation or your web site. You may continue to use the system, download items from the store, and carry-on as you have been. Once we hear anything new regarding Koken's ownership we'll let you now.

For some time, two feature requests have dominated the Koken discussion forum and our inboxes: password protection and contact forms. We resolved the first request with the release of Koken 0.20 and the Password Protect plugin last month, allowing users to lock down their entire site or particular albums. And today, with the release of Koken 0.21, we're fulfilling the second request. Contact forms are now built-in to Koken!

A long time coming

While contact forms may appear to be a straightforward feature on the surface, we had to balance the needs of thousands of Koken users. Contact forms may have completely different requirements from user to user, so we tried several iterations over the last several months until we arrived at the flexible solution included in 0.21.

You can add a contact form to any page via the Text screen in the Koken console.

The plugin includes sensible defaults, but you can customize what fields to display, what order they display in, how to label those fields, even what message is shown to the user after the form has successfully sent.

Once you have your form configured, Koken takes care of the rest. Form validation, sending the email, and showing the user a message after the form has been submitted are all handled by Koken internally, regardless of what theme you are using.

Supported in all themes

All Koken themes have been updated to ensure that your new contact forms blend right into your Koken site's existing style. Go to Store > Updates to update your themes once you have updated to Koken 0.21.

Email Endpoints

Contact forms are of no use if the emails sent from them disappear into thin air. Often, shared hosting providers do not properly configure outgoing email for PHP, meaning contact form emails and other Koken system emails may never arrive in your inbox. To resolve this, we've released a new free plugin to the Koken Store: Email Endpoints.

The Email Endpoints plugin allows you to send all your Koken email through Mandrill, a third party transactional email service that offers dependable, rock-solid email delivery. Best of all, Mandrill is free for up to 12,000 emails a month, which should be more than enough for your Koken contact form. Alternatively, you can also use your own outgoing SMTP server (Gmail, for example) instead of Mandrill. See all the details by reading the usage guide for the plugin.

Also new in Koken 0.21 is a dedicated look at your server's email configuration. Visit Settings > Email to see how email is configured for your Koken install. You can also send a test email from that screen to ensure that email sending and delivery are working properly.

Two new updates are available today for Koken users. First, we've released Koken 0.20.4 with a few important fixes. See a full list of the updates at the release notes page.

Also, there's a new update for our recently released Password Protect plugin. Early users of the Password Protect plugin asked if their password protected albums and sets could be made discoverable through their public site. In response, we've added the ability to add a custom albums index to display just the password protected albums in your Library:

Once added, the list of protected albums will be visible to any user who visits your site. They will only be prompted for a password when they click an album to view its content. With this in place, you can send any client a link to your site and they can find their album, then enter the password you've provided them.

For instructions on how to publish a page of protected collections, check out the plugin's guide. You'll find a detailed walkthrough at the end of the article.

If you are a new Koken user and need help upgrading, check out our updating instructions for both Koken itself and Store plugins.

We've just released Koken 0.20.3, which includes several minor fixes for issues our fine users have reported in the last several days. It also includes a notable fix for users of our Lightroom Publish Services plugin.

For some time, a portion of our Lightroom users have reported odd, intermittent behavior when uploading from the Lightroom plugin. Some uploads would work while others would not, accompanied by cryptic error messages. Further complicating matters was the fact that our team was unable to duplicate the issue on any of our numerous test installations.

Thanks to Koken user Jonathan Levy, we were finally able to get a reproducible form of the issue late last week. After some investigation, we traced the issue to something known as 'keep-alive' connections. When a server was using keep-alive connections, the first upload would work, but subsequent uploads would often fail due to how the connection was shared from the previous upload request. So, as of Koken 0.20.3, we now explicitly close the connection after each upload, which negates the effect of keep-alive connections and in turn resolves this problem.

For those of you who have been experiencing this issue, thank you for your patience. This is one of the challenges of self-hosted software, as it is often difficult to track down server specific issues like this one. We're glad to have this one behind us!

After a few weeks of beta testing and previews, we're happy to announce that the Password Protect plugin for Koken is now available to all via the Koken Store. Like all of our themes and plugins, it can be installed without ever leaving your browser, meaning you can purchase the plugin and enable password protection for your Koken site in a matter of minutes.

Protect your entire site, or just parts of it

The plugin works in one of two ways. First, you can protect your entire Koken site. In this mode, any visitor attempting to access any page of your site – an album, an essay, anything – will need to enter the password before they can enter. This is useful for family sites or other scenarios where you are sharing content with a select group of people. Or, you may want to password protect your entire site while you are initially getting setup, then disable the password protection only when you are ready to open your site to the general public.

For those who need selective password protection, you can instead choose to assign passwords to individual albums and sets in the Library. You may also setup a "master password" that works like a skeleton key for viewing any password protected album or set. Adding a password to an album or set is simple, it's built right into the Library's inspector.

Supported by any Koken theme

You can begin using the plugin right away, no theme changes are required. The plugin includes a simple, clean login template that will work with any Koken theme. Our premium themes – Axis 2, Madison 2, and Regale 2 – have been updated with custom login templates to match their unique style.

Summary

So that's Password Protect. You can purchase it today at the Koken Store for only $35, which includes free technical support and upgrades.

Today we're happy to announce a new major update as well as give you a sneak peek of our upcoming Password Protect plugin.

Koken 0.20

First, let's talk about what's new in 0.20. The most notable change is an update to album visibility that brings it in line with how content visibility already works. You can now mark albums as "Private". Those albums will only be viewable inside of your console. Or, perhaps you could share them with other people with a password. If there was only a plugin for such a thing. More on that in a minute.

Other than album visibility, the changes are mostly under the hood. The plugin system has been overhauled to be faster and allow for deeper connections to the core functionality of Koken, which will allow for more interesting plugin development in the future. Several performance bottlenecks were also identified and resolved, resulting in improved page load times when viewing your published site.

The 0.20 update is available now for all installs. If this is your first time upgrading, you can find instructions here. You can find a summary of all the changes here. Please note that this is the first update that enforces our new requirement of PHP 5.3 or higher. If you are running 5.2, the update will not proceed until you have worked with your host to upgrade PHP. If you need more info on the PHP 5.2 phaseout, see our dedicated article on that topic.

Password Protect plugin coming soon

As Koken has matured over the last year, one yet-to-be-realized feature has floated to the top of most user's wish list: Password protection. In fact, some of you have been wondering if you'll ever see such a feature at all.

@koken How many more years do we have to wait before you offer the #1 feature request? Password Protection.

We're happy to report that in the next few weeks, the Password Protect plugin for Koken will be landing in the Koken Store. We think it's pretty great, so much so that we couldn't wait to give you a little preview.

Protects your entire site

Want to lock down your entire site? With this plugin, you can. Any page accessed by a site visitor will display a password page for them to enter your assigned password.

Protects private albums and sets

For those who need selective password protection, this plugin also allows passwords to be assigned to individual albums and sets in the Library. You may also setup a "master password" that works like a skeleton key for viewing any password protected album or set.

Perfect for clients, family and colleagues

Password Protect fits right into the workflow of photographers and designers who need a single web site to display their public work plus private content accessible only to clients and close contacts.

Supported by any Koken theme

Every Koken theme supports this plugin by displaying a unique login template provided by the theme itself, or a simple, clean password submission page provided by the plugin as a fallback. No matter which theme you choose, it's compatible. Our premium themes – Axis 2, Madison 2, and Regale 2 – will be updated with unique login layouts that match their respective designs.

We're putting the final touches on the plugin and it should be available soon. Be sure to update to 0.20 and stay tuned!

Hot off the press, a new version of Koken is now available. This release, version 0.19, includes notable improvements in two key areas: content sorting and links.

Content sorting

To say we've "improved" content sorting is an understatement. We've redesigned sorting from top-to-bottom to more effectively meet your needs.

View any album, set, or even the root list of public albums in the Library, and you'll now see this:

The "Sort" button has been relocated from the top of the Library interface to the bottom and expanded to reflect the sort criteria currently assigned. The old "Sort" button only affected your current view (for editorial purposes). The new button does the same but also changes site order.

You may also now sort collections individually. For example, one album may be sorted by "date captured", another by drag-and-drop, and so on. This allows you to select whatever sort criteria is most appropriate for the content each collection contains.

Will the new sorting affect my current site?

If your site is published with sort filters assigned to index templates like Albums, Sets, etc, the automatic sort you've assigned there will be transferred over and applied to the source Library content. For example, if your Albums page is currently sorted by "Title", then after this upgrade your albums in the Library will also be sorted "Title". That way sorting preferences applied in Site aren't lost as part of the transition.

Content link editing

Content links -- or more specifically, their "slugs" -- are now editable in Koken 0.19.

These slimy little suckers are generated automatically by Koken using content titles or filenames when new content is published. These slug assignments were permanent, and could not be edited thereafter without deleting and recreating content with different titles.

Koken 0.19 makes this a thing of the past by allowing slug editing for images, videos, albums, sets, essays and pages. You'll now find an "edit" link under site links, as shown below:

Click edit and a panel will appear for you to input your new slug.

All links on your site will then use the new slug. If a page with an edited slug is requested using its old link, the content will still load, but an invisible canonical link will be inserted into the page's markup to alert search engines that a newer, preferred URL should be indexed instead.

Summary

We know that many Koken users were waiting for both of these improvements, and greatly appreciate everyone's patience and feedback. If you have any questions or issues with this release, don't hesitate to get in touch. If this is your first time updating Koken, you may find instructions for doing so here.

Our latest Koken update - v.0.18 - is out and ready for download. This release includes a few notable improvements that are worth pointing out.

Design facelift for HiDPI/Retina screens

Koken's entire interface has been updated with SVGs for all icons and buttons plus higher resolution images to support HiDPI / Retina displays. This makes the interface super sharp and smooth, even on standard resolution displays. A number of icons had to be completely redrawn from scratch in order to make the transition, but it was absolutely worth the effort. Koken users with late-model MacBook Pros should see a big difference.

While the hood was open we also took the opportunity to make subtle style improvements throughout the interface. All of the loading icons have been redesigned to use the "O" in our logo, gradients have been flattened, and drop shadows have been dropped. We also killed the extra footer row at the bottom of the UI to create more vertical room for content.

Tag deletion

As the old song says, it's been a long time coming, but tags can now finally be deleted. You've always been able to remove tags from content, but until now there wasn't a way to permanently delete tags from the database.

To delete a tag, simply edit any piece of content containing the tag, then click the delete link to its right. The tag will be removed from any/all images, videos, albums, sets or essays and then deleted from the back-end.

Discard draft theme settings

We've updated the theme settings panel to include a new Discard edits button. The button appears anytime a theme's draft has unpublished settings edits. Click it and the draft reverts to the live version of your site. Makes it easy to test and discard edits without worrying about screwing up your site.

ICC profile optimizations

In case you didn't know, Koken maintains the appearance of your original images by copying and applying their ICC color profiles to all duplicate images generated from them. For example, this allows an sRGB image to stay sRGB, no matter the size. While important, this step had a drawback in that it could cause slowness in image publishing; especially with large images. So we went back and improved the ICC profile process to be less intensive and faster, which helps make image publishing faster overall. This new profile retention setup will apply to all new images you import using Koken 0.18 and will also be applied to any older images in your Library that are regenerated and cached.

More

This release also includes the usual round of small bug fixes and optimizations, which you can read about in our release notes. For newer users who are upgrading for the first time, here's how.